New York 349 1978

Curator: Instantly, I'm pulled in. It feels like staring into the abyss, or maybe peering at the surface of some alien moon. There's a stark, almost brutal elegance to it. Editor: And we're looking at "New York 349", a gelatin silver print crafted in 1978 by Aaron Siskind. What's compelling here is the way he isolates seemingly mundane details. Curator: Mundane? Perhaps on the surface! But Siskind has a knack for turning decay and peeling paint into these monumental landscapes. Look at the texture – it's a raw, weathered narrative etched in silver. Editor: Yes! Think of Siskind’s practice and his love for the weathered surfaces as reflecting the Abstract Expressionists like Franz Kline or even Willem de Kooning, where gesture and surface were of vital importance to them. Curator: Absolutely! It feels so aligned with that ethos. This close-up view transforms the fragment of a wall into this expansive theatre. Even just this small segment is dense in meaning. What kind of emotional load could have left behind such traces? Editor: Right. It begs the question: What did it witness? Siskind finds beauty in the overlooked, elevating these forgotten corners. Curator: There’s almost a hieroglyphic quality, as if the wall itself were trying to communicate secrets lost to time. A code we can no longer decipher. Editor: In that case it is perhaps not dissimilar from contemporary abstract art—think Mark Tobey, for instance. Siskind leaves interpretation wide open and celebrates what has been seemingly cast aside as nothing. Curator: So true, in a way, Siskind reminds us of beauty’s potential for resurgence even from what seems irreversibly discarded. Editor: It truly resonates. Siskind reminds us of our power to reimagine and reinterpret the commonplace, unlocking the poetic possibilities embedded within the material world.